Could Lower Expectations Result in a Happier Life?

Recently, I've noticed a common trend in many of my clinical patients who have been struggling with depression, life dissatisfaction, and stress. Many wonder if their mate or their career were the perfect choice for them after all. The theme seems to be "I could have done better."

This might sound sacrilegious coming from a psychologist but maybe we need to consider lowering (rather than raising) our expectations for our lives.

There seems to be a growing expectation that we should be able to secure the perfect spouse, the perfect career, the perfect home, engineer the perfect children, and so forth to be happy and if that doesn't happen according to our plans then something is wrong that needs fixing. While we all likely believe that we should have high expectations for ourselves I wonder if unrealistically high expectations are counterproductive and destructive.

Maybe Hollywood is to blame. Perhaps watching the lives and fortunes of the rich and famous influence our views of what kind of life we should expect. For example, are we likely to feel better or worse about our lives after watching the Academy Awards later this week? Perhaps our increasingly self centered and narcissistic culture plays a role too. If it's all about me (i.e., my needs, my pleasures, my success) then we may never secure what we feel we deserve and are entitled to. So many people seem to have unrealistic expectations of what they can expect from a spouse, a career, their children, and life in general. They want it all and they want it all perfect.

While it certainly makes a great deal of sense to try and improve an unhappy marriage, an unsatisfying career, or a conflcit in family relationships, it also makes good sense to try and be realistic as to what one can expect from relationships, work, and life in general.

So, how do we manage this conflict of expectations?

While there are no magic answers there might be a few principles that can help. Four that immediately come to mind include...

1. Talk about this tension with important others. Comparing notes with those with whom you most trust might help in getting some perspective of what is and is not realistic expectations.

2. Take stock of the things you are grateful for. If we attend to our blessings perhaps we won't focus as much on our unfulfilled desires.

3. Watch less media. Focusing on the charmed lives of the rich and famous may not help us in our own efforts to live a more realistic life.

4. Don't read self-help books. Too often self-help books ultimately state that you can have it all and that you should settle for nothing less than the best. Sounds good but the unintended consequences of this perspective might be more unhappiness and disappointment due to unrealistic expectations.

So doing the right thing for ourselves might actually include lowering (and not increasing) our expectations for love, work, family, and life.

What is a good enough life for you?

What is a good enough relationship, family, career, health, and so forth?

Yours is a version of the "Marooned on a Desert Island" fantasy that I feel is promulgated in the various media forms (and joke variations): If you for some reason get stranded on a desert island, MOST LIKELY you will encounter a voluptuous and willing woman (for we male daydreamers) who has capably hacked out a paradise, replete with delicious foods and living comforts.

Anything less is NOT to be contemplated. :-0

TV and Hollywood has been selling us a bill of goods for so many years, building our expectations and sense of entitlement to epic (a la James Bond 007) proportions. Flawless beauty, happy endings, never the need to search for parking places, never the need to use the toilet, able to do amazing car tricks w/o any visible preparation, always know the right thing to say, etc.

If we had script writers writing our lives, oh, what a life we would have!

But we don't. Let's realize that - and learn to do the best with what we have and/or can create for ourselves.

This article is BS, we need to keep our expectations high in America, these kinds of things are the reason we are falling behind. I am a great example of living the dream, I am a black, who was told I would not go to college, and would not amount to much. If I set lowered expectations ,that is what would have happen. Instead the opposite happened. Keep Expectations high American….

You sound like you have done quite well. Sometimes it is good to be the underdog where not as much is expected of you. I was told I would not be able to achieve some goals but, like you, I set my goals, not expectations , high and achieved many of them. We cannot expect good things to happen all by themselves. Without initiative and hard work we should expect very little.

I graduated from college in June 2010 and I've been somewhat unhappy ever since. I've always had very high expectations for myself and now that I'm faced with the working world (and low-paying entry-level jobs) I've been realizing how unrealistic those expectations may be. This questioning of my expectations for my career have led me to look at the expectations I have in other areas of my life: my relationships, my expectations of how my family should be (my dad is enduring a long struggle with a medical condition), my expectations of how the world works, and etcetera.

Thank you for posting this as it nails down what I've been thinking to myself for a couple of months now, "maybe I need to lower my expectations to be happy".

I agree with you 100%. I often advise my counselees to be realistic in their expectations & settle for a situation which allows them some leisure & inter-personal bonding along with material success.But secretly i am often assailed by doubts if i am anti-progress or an escapist. Your views certainly echo my sentiments; & as i have seen,those of some of your readers.But today the youngsters are so performance-oriented that my words might be falling on deaf ears.
I have written a blog-post on this very subject "Ah to be Happy"@http://jeeteraho.blogspot.com.Ihope you folks find it useful.

after just breaking up a relationship, i was forced to contemplate the unrealistic expectations i've dragged along my whole life.

i have turned down or left jobs when they had aspects that i found objectionalble. dropped out of school when i came to the realization that my fantasy of what things were to be like were being unfulfilled.

how many relationships abandoned because the person had some minor flaws?

today i am unemployed and probably stuck there given my unrealistic beliefs. i have fantasy beliefs about what i can do, unless you ask me to demonstrate then i find a way to run and hide or psychosomatic illness sets in.

i even tried the approach that i will pursue what i want only to discover that the reality was much differenty than the fantasy and i abandoned that too.

what a waste of a life constantly things should be better and therefore ending up doing nothing.